Candace Owens Happens When Facts Have No History
With Candace Owens, I can no longer bite my tongue or sit on my thumbs. Up to this point, our shared hue made me hesitate. However, anti-Blackness is a color-blind racism that necessitates the roughest rebuke. So, despite her shade, I must call a pitchfork a pitchfork.
Recently, my teeth clenched when one of her toxic tweets popped up and polluted my progressive timeline. I don’t know how it got there, but there it was, and here’s what it said, “Black America must wake up to the great liberal hoax. White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is.”
Then she listed poverty rates between Black people and white people. “Black poverty: 22%. White poverty: 11%. Black poverty married couples: 7%.”
And she closed her flimsy case with this line, “Do not let liberal supremacists convince you that white people are the problem at the same time their policies cause the 77% rate of father absence in black households.”
Obviously, those aren’t the first offensive elements my eyes have seen from Candace Owens. It’s not news to me that Candace Owens performs a minstrel show for white people. It’s not news to me that no one should take her seriously, even as she skips to the bank with a million followers.
But there was something about those wasted words that made me roll to a boil. And so, I asked myself, “What happened to Candace Owens?”
Here’s my conclusion — Candace Owens is what happens when you have facts without history. Her selected facts have no backs. Candace Owens is proof you can’t always put facts first. The factors to the facts must be foremost.
Of course, the factors themselves are facts. And history itself is a fact. History is the fact that forms and informs the current facts we see. Candace Owens is missing that big and binding fact. Without the lynchpin of America’s racist history, her selectively scattered facts fly in the face of reason.
Looking at her white-supremacist statement again, she got one thing right — white supremacy isn’t a threat; it’s a promise kept. It’s a realized reality. White supremacy isn’t impending, it’s been here from the beginning.
Then with her poverty stats, she refuses to see the stats as evidence of white supremacy. Those stats are what everyone should expect in a white-supremacist nation. At what point has poverty in America been without its link to white supremacy? Even white poverty rates come from white-ruling elites.
Candace Owens won’t talk about how the past makes the present, but the people for justice must. Where are her words for America’s underfunding of predominantly Black schools? Why hasn’t she fixed her lips to talk about the racist history of divestment, white flight, and redlining? Why isn’t she talking about the racist wage gap?
I’ve noticed she doesn’t have fighting words for America’s racist and predatory lending. I’ve yet to hear her say anything about the history of racism in labor unions. And by my count, she hasn’t attempted to tally the toll from the racist War on Crime, the racist War on Drugs, and the racist mass incarceration of Black people.
Instead, she blames liberal policies. But if we could ask FDR about his New Deal, he’d confirm that liberal policies can be white-supremacist too. Liberal supremacists, as she calls them, can be white supremacists too. That’s clear.
Candace Owens seems to think Black people believe only Republicans are white supremacists, and she wants Black people to know that white supremacy is a liberal hoax. She’s wrong. Black people know better.
It’s not a liberal hoax that Republicans decided in 1963 to become “the white man’s party.” It’s not a liberal hoax that Lindsey Graham said in 2012 that Republicans aren’t generating enough “angry white men.” And it’s not a liberal hoax that Republicans aggressively blow racist dog whistles and shout racism through megaphones.
White supremacy isn’t a liberal hoax; it’s haunting. It’s always controlled both political parties. Democrats do damage too. An insidious neoliberalism, that’s wedded to white supremacy, is in both major political parties.
But it’s more than economics and social policies. The kicker that keeps kicking comes from a study of 20 million lives published in 2018. The study showed Black boys are more likely to earn less and fall into poverty than white boys even when they come from similar backgrounds.
White supremacy is the problem for Black lives. No political party has systematically addressed and redressed white supremacy in the past and in the present. Why? White supremacy is why.
So, when Candace Owens shows up to spew her selective facts, many people already know they’re aimed to distract. Even so, the people for justice shouldn’t delay or deny her what’s due. And for me, that means a strong and steady boo.
